Musicals may seem like a counterintuitive choice for a deaf theater company, but they aren’t uncommon for Deaf West, one of the few theater groups in the country led by a deaf artistic director, in its case DJ Kurs.

“When Toronto was at a particular low point in the 2000s, Luminato was conceived by business leaders as the kind of high-level, multiarts smorgasbord that would attract international cultural tourists while also providing enough free, fun and family events to entertain the city. It was planned without sufficient consultation with Canadian arts groups and has often felt like a top-down exercise, a perception that repeatedly hiring Europeans will only reinforce.”

“DARE, as the dictionary is known, has announced that it will shutter most of its operations this summer unless it can find new sources of funding to cover its roughly $525,000 annual budget. The print dictionary had been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other sources. More recently, the budget was covered in large part by stopgap grants from the university, which are set to run out.”

“Sony Pictures is planning a film adaptation of the Broadway musical … Tom Hanks and his producing partner Gary Goetzman will produce through their Playtone banner along with Paul Blake, the lead producer on Broadway.”

Laurie Spiegel: “I was playing music, I was improvising, I was making stuff up, and at a certain point I wanted to learn to write things down so I wouldn’t forget them. So I started trying to teach myself to write stuff down. One of my roommates in the house that I lived in pointed out to me that they call that composing. You make things up and write them down.”

Bergen was 84. According to critic Rex Reed, “Bergen was a legendary ‘A-list, New York Oscar party host’ — he remembers watching the Oscars one year on Bergen’s bed while sitting in between Paul Newman and Lucille Ball — but Bergen was even more passionate about women’s rights.”

“Projections of ever-longer life spans assume no incredible medical discoveries—rather, that the escalator ride simply continues. If anti-aging drugs or genetic therapies are found, the climb could accelerate. Centenarians may become the norm, rather than rarities who generate a headline in the local newspaper.”

“The Nashville Ballet is embarking on an unprecedented public fundraising campaign to finance an expansion project to grow studio space, renovate its Sylvan Heights headquarters and dramatically increase the number of students.” The campaign, called ELEVATE, “has already raised $3.7 million out of its goal of $5.5 million.”

Fans of the bestselling author/public radio legend will know that he is obsessed with picking up the litter along the roadsides near his West Sussex home. Now the local council has honored him in the most fitting way possible.

“To the extent that anyone can articulate a sense of aesthetics for this new landscape, it’s all very superficial: It should twinkle at night, bustle by day, have some nice green things here and there, and mainly not impose very much on our eyes or mind. The new Silver Line stations do all of that, and they do it well.”

“The big ratings swings perplexed industry leaders and analysts. The correction in audience share raised questions about how just two families in Nielsen’s audience pool of 2,700 Los Angeles-area families could have such an enormous effect on the ratings.”

“By now, Cultural Studies has infiltrated nearly every corner of the humanities and social sciences, and so a generation of educated, internet-addicted music listeners has spent their formative university years questioning the primacy of their own tastes and interrogating bricolage in early-nineties hip hop.”

“The federal agency reports that, in 2013, 2.1 million workers had, as their primary occupation, a job that fell into the “artist” category (including musician, writer, and designer). Another 271,000 or so reported their second job—the one where they put in fewer hours than their main job—fit that description.”

“Why do these thinkers’ personal lives and ideological compromises seem unusually relevant to their work, beyond the usual scandal-sheet Schadenfreude? It may have something to do with their distinctive views regarding the relevance (or, rather, irrelevance) of character and personality to the objects of their study.”

“If you want to see intelligent, comprehensive coverage of the arts – features and reviews alike – then you’ve got to start clicking. Journalism is well on its way to being a numbers game for most outlets.”

“While small clubs such as the Smell have long drawn adventurous young punks and Disney Hall gets an older classical crowd, these new spaces signal an audience of young residents for whom music is part of an urbane, walkable lifestyle.”

The company’s music director, still in his first season back after a two-year sick leave, will double his conducting load next season as his health continues to rebound. Also, the Met will stage a major contemporary opera that caused some ferocious public battles not all that long ago.

“In an attempt to liberate Facebook from ‘photos of lunch,’ that circa-2009 shorthand for all things annoying and self-promotional on the Internet, Facebook ‘occupiers’ are actually engaging in the exact same behavior — posting self-indulgent poems or images to show off how sophisticated they are.”